Tuesday, August 18, 1998 Last modified at 1:12 a.m. on Tuesday, August 18, 1998

Pulitzer Prize winner Murray dies at 78

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times columnist who won a Pulitzer Prize and put heart, humor and humanity on America's sports pages for nearly four decades, is dead at 78.

Murray, one of the founders of Sports Illustrated, died of cardiac arrest late Sunday at his Brentwood home, Times sports editor Bill Dwyre said Monday.

"He was not the star of the sports department. He was the star of the newspaper," Times editor Michael Parks said. "He could use sports as a metaphor for life."

Murray, who joined the Times in 1961, was still writing three nationally syndicated columns a week. For his final story, he covered Free House's victory Saturday in the Pacific Classic at Del Mar race track for Sunday's editions.

"In my opinion, he was the best sports writer in history. He knew more about everything than everybody else I ever knew. He could talk about Chaucer just like he could talk about Mark McGwire. He was just an amazing person," said Miami Herald columnist Edwin Pope, a friend for 35 years.

When Murray won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, he became only the fourth sports columnist to receive the honor, joining Red Smith, Arthur Daley and Dave Anderson, all New York Times writers.

"This is going to make it a little easier on the guy who writes my obit," Murray said of winning journalism's highest honor.

Murray was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1987. He won The Associated Press Sports Editors award for best column writing in 1984 and the APSE Red Smith Award for career achievement in sports writing in 1982.

"He and Red Smith were two of the great American writers," Anderson said. "He was such a great guy to be with."

Murray painted vivid images even if he couldn't see the people and events he was writing about. He had been legally blind since 1979 after getting a detached retina in his left eye and a cataract in his right.

One of his most popular columns was a farewell to his own "old blue eye," listing all the sights it had seen - "Reggie Jackson with the count 3 and 2 and the Series on the line. ... a sky full of stars, moonlight on the water" - visions that remained etched clearly in his memory.

The only other time Murray wrote a personal column was when his first wife, Geraldine, died of cancer in 1984, after 38 years of marriage.

"She never told a lie in her life. And she didn't think anyone else did. Deceit puzzled her. Dishonesty dismayed her. She thought people were good. Around her, surprisingly, they were," Murray wrote.

"Those are two of the most touching stories that I have ever read and I wish every person alive could read those stories," said Jerry West, executive vice president of the Los Angeles Lakers, who had known Murray since 1960. "Jim touched a lot of people's lives."

Murray had heart surgery in late 1994 and joked about it when he returned to his column a couple of months later, feigning loss of memory about what happened in the sports world in the interim, including the strike that forced the cancellation of the World Series.

"How could there be no World Series? ... Next, they'll be telling me George Foreman won the heavyweight championship," he wrote.

"They try to tell me there wasn't one but I say, C'mon! Baseball couldn't be that stupid. What's America without a World Series? Latvia? France without wine?"

Murray wrote about people who played games for a living, focusing on their fears and joys. He left the scores and batting averages for the agate page.

"He not only painted a very good picture, he did it in a very humorous way," said former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. "He had that dry humor about him."

Not everyone laughed. Murray's biting wit angered some, including Indianapolis 500 officials who took offense when he called the race "America's Earache." Alarmed by Indy's death toll, he wrote one of his most famous lines: "Gentlemen, start your coffins."

Hall of Fame jockey Bill Shoemaker, the subject of several Murray columns, was a regular reader of the writer he called "one of a kind."

"He had a way of putting it down on paper that nobody else could do," Shoemaker said. "He could write a story about you that might sound a little derogatory, but the way he wrote it, you had to laugh."

Murray also was always willing to lend a colleague a hand.

Pope remembered the time he hurt his left arm and Murray carted his typewriter around the Super Bowl in New Orleans. Pope struggled to type with one hand.

"At the end of the game, he said, 'Tell you what. You dictate your column to me,"' Pope said. "This is the most famous columnist in the country. I said, 'I can't let you do that.' But he was going to do it."

Murray's ability to humanize all aspects of sports - from the humorous to the tragic - earned him millions of readers.

Some examples:

On Ben Hogan: "He was barely 5-foot-7, couldn't have weighed 125. His butt was so nonexistent his hip pockets ran together. His clubs had a remnant-barrel look, and his clothes, while neat, had a mail-order look about them."

"The only thing that would give him away were the eyes. Gray-blue, they had a piercing quality. They were the eyes of a circling bird of prey: fearless, fierce, the pupil no more than a dot in their imperious center. They were not the eyes of a loser."

On Shoemaker: "He won more races than any rider who ever lived and he did it with a velvet touch and graceful pace that made every race a ballet, not a charge. Shoemaker rode a horse the way DiMaggio caught a fly ball, or Sinatra sang a ballad - with the effortless ease and grace of a guy who was born to do what he was doing."

"Watching Shoe ride a horse was like watching Gene Kelly dance or Gauguin paint. It was art. You had the feeling he could win the Kentucky Derby on a Brahma bull."

Born Dec. 29, 1919, in Hartford, Conn., Murray was the son of a pharmacist. He began his newspaper career as a campus correspondent for the Hartford Times before graduating from Trinity College in 1943. He became a police reporter at the New Haven (Conn.) Register before heading to Los Angeles in 1944, when he got a job at the Los Angeles Examiner.

He joined Time magazine in 1948 and became the West Coast editor for Sports Illustrated in 1953.

Murray is survived by his wife, Linda McCoy Murray, and three of his four children from his first marriage, Ted, Tony and Pam. Murray's youngest son, Ricky, died from a drug overdose in 1982.